The Triumph of Economics

By

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

Updated Jan. 2, 1997 12:01 a.m. ET

"Everybody's an economist now." The statement is often heard, but its implications aren't often explored. The shift to economics as our new paradigm of human existence, and away from psychology and psychoanalysis, helps to explain, among other things, the decline of the activist impulse on and off our nation's campuses.

Whatever else economics offers us, it certainly teaches that things aren't simple, that "winning" and "losing" aren't always exactly opposites, and that things do have rather...